Cossacks in Paris

The growing threat of a new Eastern Front War

Russian troops have been in Paris before, and not so long ago they were in Berlin, it is not impossible to imagine that happening again. So starts many an article on the Russian threat - but how likely is this?

The beginning’s of the Ukraine war seemed to speak against this, and justify people like Peter Hitchens who said that the Russian Army was a “shabby army, as corrupt as the state it serves”. That was true then, but it has been a long 2 years..

The Russian army today is not the same as it was in 2022 - it has suffered 10,000’s of casualties at least, including some of its best pre-war troops, but in the process it has hardened itself into a force capable of sustaining (and likely winning), a major modern war. It has burnt through a great number of its soviet era weaponry, but the country has recreated its war industry and is now outproducing the entirety of NATO in several key area’s, including but not limited to: Tanks, APC’s, artillery shells, Short Range Ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, Glide bombs and possibly even drones. To say nothing of a mobilisation system that outclasses anything the West has.

There remains area’s the Russian are having trouble with, highly complex machines like advanced fighter aircraft, Attack Helicopters and ships are suffering due to being cut off from European manufacturing -however so far at least it seems the help from China has been able to plug these gaps.

What does this add up to? It means Russia now has an army 400,00 strong in the front line alone, gaining battlefield experience in a modern peer-to-peer war; drone warfare, trench storming, logistics, urban and open combat, everything. It is an army getting better equipped and seemingly better led. Its morale is growing and its success has shown that the Russian model of paid contract soldiers works well enough in a world where nationalism is a dying flame. In brief, Russia now has one of the best armed forces in the world, for real this time, and a war economy behind it that can sustain it. Putin is secure and the Russian people are largely agreeing that NATO and the West hate them and want them humiliated.

This creates a very real danger, if Russia wins the Ukraine war, and the West does not end its sanctions, then Russia will be left with a war economy and no war to fight. What exactly will it do then? Demobilise all those men? Close the tank and artillery factories and put all those people out of work?

A war economy and no war begs for an easy solution - start another war. And why not? If you kicked NATO’s ass in Ukraine, why not elsewhere? NATO is not going to nuke you if you don’t nuke them, and are American troops really going to be deployed for Lithuania? Meanwhile is there any European nation able to deploy the number of troops needed to fight the Russian army? Can they sustain a multi year war with 400,000+ men in the field?

The temptation for the Russians must be real. But perhaps worse than any desires or imperial dreams of Putin that people yap on about, is the very real economic and political necessity of doing it. When Kurt Vonnegut, who as an American POW in Dresden saw it firebombed, was asked why he thought it happened, he said it was just a question of the Bureaucracy asking “What are we going to do today?” They built the planes and the bombs and by god they were gonna use them.

A Russian invasion of Europe could begin in a similar way, as economic policy. As a contracted out war to keep the Russian economy going and even as part of the culture wars (which Putin cynically uses despite believing in nothing himself). The Russian economy is one of the fastest growing in the G20, it’s at full employment and wages are rising, while the war seems to spurring on manufacturing and technological growth in a way somewhere like the UK can only dream of. Elina Ribarova writing for the the Financial Times stated: “Russia now boasts 6,000 military-industrial enterprises, a notable increase from the prewar figure of less than 2,000. These establishments collectively employ over 3.5mn individuals who operate round-the-clock, with three shifts and six-day workweeks becoming the norm.”

With the war over and sanctions still in place, what are they going to do, all go to work selling oil to India at worse than pre-war prices?

But what about NATO? The thing with NATO is that its article 5 policy is like a law - it only has force if people believe in it and enforce it. I always wondered why the 1982 Argentine attack on the Falkland’s, a British territory, never triggered article 5? The reason I discovered, and I kid you not here, is that it happened in the Southern Hemisphere and so was not covered by NATO. As if an American Battle fleet being wiped out by a Soviet strike in the south Atlantic would not have triggered a NATO response.. No the real reason the Falklands war did not trigger NATO was because the Americans were not interested in it. Are they interested in Latvia?

There is a very real argument to be made that we have reached the point where Article 5 is not going to be enforced. Sure a nuclear strike will trigger a response, like someone murdering a major celebrity would trigger a serious murder investigation, but Russia just nibbling away at eastern Europe? Just another shop lifting spree in San Francisco, barely a crime now-a-days. Perhaps article 5 has been decriminalised also?

Therefore I conclude that the Russian threat in Europe is only growing every day. The Ukraine war, if allowed to drag on to a complete Ukrainian collapse, may be remembered historically as simply a prelude to another European eastern front war.

The only way to avoid this is to create an off-ramp for Russia - a peace that allows it to return to selling oil and gas and not making tanks. And secondly Europe must seriously re-arm to deter war. This can be done without putting troops in Ukraine or along Russia’s border, but rather by simply upscaling their own production capabilities of basic military Materiel. This war has already shown that rather than billion dollar Wunderwaffe projects, a few millions shells and some cheap drones bought online can stop whole armoured Corps. And as the Second world war showed and Stalin said, ‘quantity has a quality all of its own’ - the most advanced tank can be blown up by a cheap mine or drone as easily as a much less sophisticated model, which can at least be replaced. Positional warfare is likely to be the norm until a major counter to drones is found, European Armies should prepare accordingly, and work politically to keep Ukraine alive as a buffer state, and the Russian’s huffing gas rather than tank fumes.